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The university quickly ramped up night patrols and put out a call for information about the incident. Penn State also increased the presence of auxiliary officers and campus escorts this weekend.

“We have devoted all available resources to finding the suspects,” Police Chief Tyrone Parham told the CDT’s Mike Dawson.

The Department of Education wonders if Penn State police would have responded with the same intensity in the years before the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal hit.

The number of sexual assault reports filed at Penn State have jumped sharply since November 2011, when Sandusky was charged.

The variation is startling. It’s not hard to understand why the change set off alarms in Washington.

Consider:

• In 2012, the year after the Sandusky scandal broke, police responded to 56 reports of sex offenses on the University Park campus.

• In the year that ended with the Sandusky charges, there were 24 such reports.

• In 2010, the year before the scandal unfolded, there were just four.

The university is being investigated through the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to determine if the university complied with Title IX, which protects individuals from discrimination.

This is the department’s second investigation of compliance at Penn State. In late 2011, the Education Department said it would look into whether Penn State’s initial response to Sandusky reports violated the Clery Act, which requires prompt reporting of alleged criminal activity. That inquiry is not yet complete.

The latest Penn State investigation followed closely a proclamation by President Barack Obama that the administration would work toward improving university cultures and reducing crimes against women.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, in an op-ed piece in the CDT, noted a 50 percent increase nationally in forcible sex offenses reported to the federal government from 2009 to 2012.

Many of the sexual assaults reported in 2012 at Penn State allegedly occurred much earlier, some as far back as the 1970s. And some involved Sandusky’s victims.

The federal investigation may shed light on the cause-and-effect relationship between the Sandusky case and increased reporting of sexual assaults.

Did the publicity prompt some to come forward who had been reluctant in the past? Or was Penn State now taking reports more seriously, which in turn makes victims feel more confident in reporting?

We suspect both factors are at work.

What ultimately matters is how Penn State reacts to such incidents in the months and years ahead.

The university’s response to a female student’s report that she was abducted on campus and became a victim of attempted sexual assault suggests that the message, at least for the moment, has been received.

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Man strips naked, straddles vehicle after car crash

A man was facing multiple charges, police said, after allegedly crashing his car in a multi-vehicle collision, assaulting another man, stripping naked, straddling a vehicle as it drove along a highway, and causing traffic delays on December 11.
The incident happened on Route 28 in Virginia. This footage shows the aftermath of the collision. The man can be seen behaving erratically, and strips naked for a period. He is also seen straddling the headboard frame of a vehicle.
Police said the man was detained for a short time on the grounds of Dulles Airport, after the events in this footage.
“He was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries,” police said. “No one else was injured during the crash or assault. Charges are pending as we are working to identify the suspect.”